Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (review)

Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. By Walter Johnson (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999) 283 pp. $26.00

This study considers the market for slaves as a multidimensional human experience, focusing primarily on New Orleans. Gracefully written, its most original contribution is a vivid account of life in the "slave pens," where new arrivals were locked up at night and paraded for potential buyers during the day.

Although he draws upon diverse and previously underutilized evidence, such as slave sales disputes from the Louisiana courts, notarized acts of sale, and slave narratives, Johnson presents no original quantitative information about the slave markets, these being (in his words) "less important to my argument than the window into slavery provided by the moment of the slave sale" (18). There is certainly a valid place for non-quantitative studies of these matters, emphasizing the subjective role of slave markets for both owners and slaves. But it is somewhat harder to accept that Johnson makes no attempt at an authoritative description of the institutional arrangements and practices in these markets. For example, he places heavy emphasis on "the daily dialectic of categorization and differentiation," in which slaves were grouped into categories for purposes of universal price comparisons (58, 118-119). One might reasonably expect that a specialized study would present detailed evidence on what these categories were and how they developed over time, but the book does not do so. All summary statements about magnitudes invariably come attached to the citation of a secondary work, most often Michael Tadman's Speculators and Slaves (Madison, 1989).

Despite these shortcomings, Soul by Soul proffers many original insights about the implications of these markets for the lives of slaves. Most compelling are the ways in which the feelings and behavior of the slaves themselves unavoidably played a role in market transactions. Widely suspected of "buying the sick and malign on the cheap only to sell them at premium prices" (124)--a phenomenon known in economics as the "lemons problem"--slave traders had a "story" for every slave on sale, explaining why they happened to be on the market, through no fault of their own (for example, "the Owner being on the eve of departure for Europe.") But since the slaves, being human, were in position to falsify these claims, the traders gave them a carefully scripted role, often with inducements of promised privileges. If particularly fortunate or clever, slaves could manipulate the terms of their own sale, and Johnson shows that a considerable lore of knowledge accumulated among the slaves about this art. Information provided by slaves could also be important in post-sale disputes under Louisiana's "redhibition" (or implied warranty) laws, when slaves were in poor health or did not possess the skills for which they were advertised. These parts of the book will interest students of slavery from all disciplines.

Less successful is the argument that the slave market was the essence of self-definition for white southerners. Johnson is persuasive in suggesting that awareness of slave values was pervasive, and that this wealth was an essential basis for the southern economy. However, his belief that this consideration "is peculiarly absent from antebellum studies of slavery" is only possible because of his neglect of much of the economic history literature (230-231). But the subjective attitudes that receive much attention--bragging about bargain prices, embarrassment over imprudent purchases, even the elaborate self-deceptions and rationalizations--could apply to many other markets in conspicuous durables, such as horses, houses, and automobiles. Perhaps the most chilling feature of slave-owning class attitudes was their banality.

Gavin Wright
Stanford University

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